Chapter 4

Blood and Thunder

'His first action on leaving college was to blow off steam by leading an
expedition into Central America. In the next few years he headed three, all of
them undertaken to study savage peoples and cultures to provide fodder for his
articles and stories. Between 1933 and 1941 he visited many barbaric cultures
and yet found time to write seven million words of published fact and
fiction.' (A Brief Biography of L. Ron Hubbard, 1959)

Precious little care went into compiling the many biographies of L. Ron
Hubbard. Had anyone bothered to research Hubbard's published output, it would
immediately have been obvious that he had not written anything like seven
million words during this period. Between 1933 and 1941, he published about
160 articles and stories, almost all of them in pulp magazines. The nature of
the medium proscribed lengthy literary efforts, thus pulp fiction tended to be
short, with few stories running to more than 10,000 words. If he had written
seven million published words, the average length of each of his
contributions would have been an impossible 44,000 words.

A little intelligent inquiry would also have established that Hubbard never
left North America during the years in question: the 'fodder' for his stories
derived not from expeditions to faraway places, but from past experiences
embellished by his fecund imagination. Neither did he visit 'barbaric
cultures', except, perhaps, those to be found in New York and Los Angeles
. . .

* * * * *

Ron arrived back in Washington DC in February 1933, not too disappointed at
his failure as a gold prospector and hotly anxious to renew his
acquaintanceship with a young lady he had met on a gliding field shortly
before his father sent him packing to Puerto Rico.

The object of his ardour was a twenty-six-year-old farmer's daughter from
Elkton, Maryland. Her name was Margaret Louise Grubb, but everyone called her
Polly. She was a bright, pretty girl with bobbed blond hair and an independent
streak in keeping with the age of Amelia Earhart who, nine months earlier, had
become the first

woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Earhart inspired thousands of
American women to take an interest in aviation and at weekends Polly used to
like to walk out to an airfield near her home to watch the gliders wobble
uncertainly into the air behind a tow from an aged and rusting Ford.

An only child whose mother had died years earlier, she both looked after
her father and supported herself financially (she had got her first job,
working in a shoe shop, at the age of sixteen). But despite her
responsibilities, she was soon determined to learn to fly and was well on the
way to getting her own licence[1] when a young man
with startling red hair showed up at the airfield one weekend.

Polly could hardly fail to register Ron's arrival since he was immediately
the focus of attention among the little group of leather-helmeted pilots
waiting for a tow. They seemed to gather naturally around him, laughing
frequently while he talked non-stop, slicing the air with his hands to
illustrate his various aerial exploits. For his part, it was not long before
Ron noticed the attractive young woman in flying gear and strolled over to
talk to her.

Although she was nearly four years older than Ron, the difference in their
ages did not bother Polly in the least. Other, less open-minded, women might
never have considered the possibility of a romance with a man younger than
themselves, but Polly found Ron to be an irresistible companion - kind,
considerate, entertaining and always able to make her laugh. He talked a great
deal about his travels in the East, but she was never bored; indeed, she was
constantly amazed at all the things he had seen and done. He was so much more
mature, so much more worldly, than the young men she knew around
Elkton, a rural community of less than six thousand people close to the
north-east corner of Chesapeake Bay. Most of them had never been
further than Wilmington, Delaware, ten miles up the road.

Polly's father was, understandably, faintly alarmed to learn that his
daughter was 'walking out' with Ron Hubbard. It was not that he did not like
the young man; he, too, thought Ron was charming. Nor was he concerned that
Ron was younger than Polly. What worried him was the fact that Ron had neither
money nor career prospects and apparently had no intention looking for a job,
since he planned to support himself by writing. In Mr Grubb's eyes, being a
writer was not a job, and nothing Ron could do or say would convince
him otherwise, particularly since he could only produce two articles from the
Sportsman Pilot as evidence of his earning potential.

However, both Mr Grubb and Ron's parents recognized the futility of trying
to oppose the match. Polly was quite as headstrong as Ron and if she had made
up her mind to marry him, there was nothing anyone in the world could do to
stop her. And Ron, still the adored

only child, always got his own way with his parents. Blessings were
reluctantly bestowed and the marriage took place in Elkton on Thursday 13
April. Many of the guests correctly speculated about the whirlwind nature of
the courtship and the speed with which the ceremony was arranged. Polly and
Ron moved into a little rented house in Laytonsville, Maryland, where she had
a spontaneous abortion. In October, she discovered she was pregnant again.

In May Ron received an assignment from the Sportsman Pilot to cover
an amateur flying competition at College Park Airport, near Washington. His
report was competent enough and written in his usual breezy prose: 'Since I
was, perforce and per poverty, among the spectators, I can speak only from the
ground view and venture the point that those six [pylon] races suffered on
only one score. They inherited the disadvantage of all conventional pylon
races - we on the ground had nothing to watch save an empty sky as the ships
disappeared for their swing around the course. The finishes, though, made up
for that temporarily empty sky. The home stretch brought the ships down a
brisk wind, through some bumps for which the field's tree-trimmed boundaries
must be blamed, and down across the finish line in a power dive to fifty
feet. That satisfied the spectators; it looked meteoric and heroic. And you
know spectators.'

The article was published in the May/June issue of the magazine, with
photographs also provided by Ron. It was his first published piece as a
professional writer and he was very proud of it, but it could hardly be
described as a promising start to his career. Months would pass before his
by-line appeared again.

For a short while it seemed it did not much matter that Ron was finding it
difficult to make a living as a writer, for on Friday 18 August, a headline in
the Washington Daily News proclaimed: 'Youthful DC Adventurer Finds
Gold in Nearby Maryland After Trek Fails.' The three-column story reported
that L. Ron Hubbard, while on furlough from his job as general manager of West
Indies Minerals Inc, had discovered gold on his wife's farm in Maryland.

Much was made of the irony of a prospector striking gold in his own back
yard: 'Hubbard, still in his twenties, left here last year for Antilles, West
Indies, in search of gold so that he might return and marry the girl he met
shortly before his departure. He returned a short time ago empty handed and
considerably weakened from fever . . . "Imagine me going 1300 miles
in search of gold when it lay right at the back door of my bride-to-be,"
Hubbard said dejectedly.'

Ron told the newspaper that mining would soon be under way 'on a large
scale' and he had also encountered several specimens of a curious white metal
he believed was either platinum or iridium. Two photographs accompanied the
story, one of Polly, fetchingly attired in boots

and jodhpurs, panning for gold, and another of the young couple examining a
large chunk of rock with an explanatory caption: 'L. Ron Hubbard, the
prospector, says the boulder in the above photo is the largest specimen of
gold quartz he has ever seen.'

Paradoxically, despite having struck gold, Ron's financial situation
remained precarious. In September, his glider pilot licence expired and he was
unable to renew it as he had not completed the necessary ten hours' solo
flying in the previous six months. The problem was simply that he had no
money, but in a plaintive letter to the Bureau of Aeronautics he side-stepped
confessing he was broke by claiming the difficulty was that there was 'no
glider within two hundred miles in which I would care to risk my neck'. The
Washington Glider Club had offered him the use of their Franklin but it was in
such a sorry condition he had to 'beg off' and he did not want to use a
primary glider because 'I cracked one up once in Port Huron, Michigan, for the
simple reason that most primaries won't fly.'

Ron was, as always, optimistic about the future. 'Here's the point,' he
wrote. 'I am going to get me a glider next spring. A big Franklin. It took me
two months of waiting on good flying days and inspectors the last time I took
the commercial exam. I don't want to have to go through all that next springs
[sic], for springs at best are fleeting. I've flown a great deal more
than most glider pilots. Maybe you've seen one of my glider articles in
aviation magazines. My one ambition is to get a glider of my own.

'And here's my plea. Isn't there some way you can extend this thing in view
of the circumstances . . . Isn't there something you can do about
it?'[2]

It was a naïve hope: no bureaucracy is structured to indulge the
roseate ambitions of young men and the Bureau of Aeronautics was no exception.
Its dour reply was brief: 'It is regretted that your glider pilot's licence
. . . cannot be extended as requested. Also it is the policy of this
Department not to extend licences.'[3] Officially it
was the end of Ron's gliding career, for he never again held a licence
although he would apply, a couple more times, for a student pilot's licence.

In October, Ron contributed another feature to the Sportsman Pilot,
this time a profile of Chet Warrington, a well-known Washington pilot, and in
November he wrote an article about the infant science of radio navigation. His
lack of a licence notwithstanding, he always adopted a chatty,
aviator-to-aviator style: 'Personally, I abhor navigation. It takes too much
algebra and I don't speak good algebra . . . It's my ambition to
step into a ship some day and take off in rain and fog with the other coast in
mind as a destination. But I don't like circular rules and too many
gadgets. I'm lazy, I want someone to tie a piece of string to the hub of the
prop and lead me right where I want

to go. That's my ambition, and I'll bet my last turnbuckle in a power dive
that it's yours too.'

In addition to his three pieces for the Sportsman Pilot, Ron also
sold an article titled 'Navy Pets' to the Washington Star in 1933. But
that was the sum of his published output for the year.

The going rate for freelance writers around that time was a cent a
word. Polly, whose thickening waistline added greatly to her worries,
calculated at the end of 1933 that her husband had managed to earn, during the
course of that year, rather less than $100.

There were better times ahead, however, for Ron soon discovered his natural
habitat as a writer - the blood and thunder world of 'the pulps'.

Pulp magazines had an honorable literary genesis in the United States and
an eclectic following: John Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915
for Adventure magazine, which at one time counted among its subscribers
such unlikely fellow travellers as Harry Truman and Al Capone. Writers like
C.S. Forester, Erle Stanley Gardner and Joseph Conrad were introduced to huge
new audiences through the pulps, as were unforgettable characters like Buffalo
Bill, boy detective Nick Cartot and the ever-inscrutable Dr Fu Manchu. The
most successful of all pulp heroes, Edgar Rice Burrough's 'Tarzan of the
Apes', made his first appearance in the pages of All-Story magazine and
went on to spawn the longest-running adventure comic strip and Hollywood's
biggest money-making film series.

By the early '30s, pulp fiction was a major source of inexpensive
entertainment for millions of Americans and a convenient means of escape from
the anxieties and realities of the Depression. For as little as a dime,
readers could enter into an action-packed adventure in which the heroes
slugged their way out of tight spots in various exotic corners of an
improbable world. Good invariably triumphed over evil and sex was never
allowed to complicate the plot, for no hero ever proceeded beyond a chaste
kiss and no heroine would dream of expecting anything more.

In 1934, more than 150 pulp magazines were published in New York
alone. Black Mask was considered the best of the bunch by writers,
largely because it paid its top contributors as much as a nickel a word, but
Argosy, Adventure, Dime Detective and Dime Western
were all said to offer more than the basic rate of a cent a word to the best
writers. As the average 128-page pulp magazine contained around 65,000 words
and as many of them were published weekly, the market for freelance writers
was both enormous and potentially lucrative.

Of all this L. Ron Hubbard knew virtually nothing until he began to cast
around for new outlets as a matter of urgency after his first

disastrous year as a writer. 'He told me', said his Aunt Marnie, 'that he
went into a bookstall and picked up all the pulp books from the rack. He took
a big pile home to see what it was that people wanted to read. He thought a
lot of it was junk and he knew he could do better. That's how he started
writing mystery stories.'[4]

More importantly, perhaps, it dawned on Ron that he had been writing in the
pulp genre for most of his life. The swashbuckling short stories he had
scribbled across page after page of old accounts books when he was in his
teens were, he belatedly realized, precisely the sort of material that was to
be found between the lurid covers of the most popular 'pulps'.

Polly was fast expanding and every week they were deeper in debt. Ron knew
he had to earn money somehow and the 'pulps' seemed to offer the best
hope. He began writing one story after another, winding page after page into
his typewriter without a break, often hammering away all night. Typing at
phenomenal speed, never needing to pause for thought, never bothering to read
through what he had written, he roamed the entire range of adventure fiction
with red-blooded heroes who were gunslingers, detectives, pirates, foreign
legionnaires, spies, flying aces, soldiers of fortune and grizzled old sea
captains. For a period of six weeks he wrote a complete story of between 4,500
and 20,000 words every day, gathered up the pages when he had finished and
mailed it to one or another of the pulps in New York without a second look.

It did not take long to pay off. One morning Ron went out to collect the
mail and found there were two cheques waiting for him, totalling $300 - more
money than he had ever earned in his life. The first was from Thrilling
Adventures for a story called 'The Green God', the second from The
Phantom Detective for 'Calling Squad Cars'. More acceptances soon followed
- 'Sea Fangs' was bought by Five Novels Monthly, 'Dead Men Kill' by
Thrilling Detective, 'The Carnival of Death' by Popular
Detective . . .

By the end of April Ron had earned enough money to take Polly on a short
holiday to California. They took a cheap hotel room at Encinitas, a resort a
few miles north of San Diego, but Polly, now seven months into her pregnancy,
found the unaccustomed heat somewhat debilitating. On 7 May 1934, she decided
to take a dip in the ocean to cool off and got caught in a rip tide. She was a
strong swimmer but only just managed to get back to the beach and the exertion
brought on labour. Later that day she gave birth to a son.

The baby weighed only 2lb 2oz and clung to life by the most gossamer of
threads. Praying he would survive, they named him Lafayette Ronald Hubbard
Junior. Ron constructed a crude incubator, first out of a shoe box, then by
lining a cupboard drawer with

blankets and keeping it warm with an electric light bulb; Polly wrapped the
mewling mite in cotton wool and fed him with an eye-dropper. For two months
they maintained a day and night vigil, taking it in turns to watch over the
infant and marvelling at its will to live. While Polly was pregnant, Ron's
father always used to ask her how 'his Nibs' was doing and by the time the
danger period had passed L. Ron Hubbard Junior was known to the entire family
as 'Nibs', a name that would stick for the rest of his life.

Fatherhood in no way moderated Ron's desire to be seen as a devil-may-care
adventurer and fearless aviator and he assiduously promoted this image at
every opportunity. In July, for example, he was the subject of a glowing
tribute in the 'Who's Who' column of the Pilot, 'The Magazine for
Aviation's Personnel', which described him as 'one of the outstanding glider
pilots in the country'. The author, H. Latane Lewis II, made no secret of his
admiration.

'Whenever two or three pilots are gathered together around the Nation's
Capital,' he wrote, 'whether it be a Congressional hearing or just in the back
of some hangar, you'll probably hear the name of Ron Hubbard mentioned,
accompanied by such adjectives as "crazy", "wild" and "dizzy". For the
flaming-haired pilot hit the city like a tornado a few years ago and made
women scream and strong men weep by his aerial antics. He just dared the
ground to come up and hit him . . . Ron could do more stunts in a
sailplane than most pilots can in a pursuit job. He would come out of spins at
an altitude of thirty inches and thumb his nose at the undertakers who used to
come out to the field and titter.'

It was not too surprising that Ron was considered to be eminently suitable
for inclusion in the 'Who's Who' column, for it was patently obvious that he
had been at pains to project himself as the most colourful of characters:
'Before he fell from grace and became an aviator, he was, at various times,
top Sergeant in the Marines, radio crooner, newspaper reporter, gold miner in
the West Indies and movie director-explorer . . .' Among his other
achievements, it seems he taught himself to fly powered aircraft ('He climbed
into a fast ship and, without any dual time at all, gave the engine the soup
and hopped off . . .'), then became a barnstormer and 'flew under
every telephone wire in the Middle West', before settling down to become
director of the flying club at George Washington University. H. Latane Lewis
II concluded that Ron was 'one of aviation's most distinguished hellraisers'.
It was a sobriquet with which the subject heartily concurred.

When Nibs was bawling and burping like other contented babies, the
twenty-three-year-old 'distinguished hell-raiser' decided it was time to make
the acquaintance of his fellow pulp writers. Leaving Polly and the baby at
home, he caught a train for New York and

checked into a $1.50-a-night room at the Forty-fourth Street Hotel, which
he had been assured was where many visiting writers stayed.

In 1934, with the country still in the stranglehold of the Depression,
there were few tourists in New York, but even before the Wall Street Crash the
Forty-fourth Street Hotel had rarely attracted much tourist trade. It was a
seedy establishment on Times Square largely patronized by out-of-work actors,
third-rate vaudeville performers, wrestlers, touts and bookies. Frank Gruber,
the only pulp writer resident when Ron arrived, accurately characterized his
fellow guests as 'all-round no-goods and deadbeats'.

Gruber was an aspiring writer from Mount Morris, Illinois, who had come to
New York to make his fortune on the strength of selling one story to Secret
Agent X magazine and a couple more to Underworld. That he was not
succeeding soon became evident when he explained to Ron how to get a free bowl
of tomato soup at an Automat. All you had to do, he said, was pick up a bowl,
fill it with hot water, skip the nickel slot which dispensed soup powder and
grab a couple of bags of crackers. You took your bowl of hot water to a table,
crumbled the crackers into it, then tipped in half a bottle of tomato
ketchup. 'Presto!' said Gruber triumphantly. 'Tomato soup.'

Not entirely motivated by charity, Ron offered to buy Gruber a
meal. Sitting in Thompson's Restaurant on Sixth Avenue, just around the corner
from the hotel, Ron pumped the other man for information about which editors
were easiest to see, who was buying what kind of material and which magazines
paid most. He made a list of the commissioning editors at the most important
publishers - Street and Smith, the Frank A. Munsey Company, Popular
Publications and Dell Magazines.

A few days later, Gruber took Ron along to Rosoff's restaurant on 43rd
Street, where members of the American Fiction Guild met for lunch every
Friday. Most of the successful pulp writers in New York were members of the
Guild and most of them gathered at Rosoff's at lunchtime on Fridays. They were
names familiar to millions of pulp readers: Lester Dent, creator of Doc
Savage; George Bruce, acknowledged ace of battle-in-the-air yarns; Norvell
Page, who was said to earn $500 a month for his stories in the Spider;
and Theodore Tinsley, a regular contributor to Black Mask. President of
the Guild was Arthur J. Burks, who had been dubbed 'King of the Pulps' in a
New Yorker profile and quoted as saying that any pulp writer who did
not make at least $400 a month was not worth his salt. It was a remark that
was to cause him considerable embarrassment, for it was common knowledge in
the Guild that Burks never earned that much, despite turning out around two
hundred thousand words every month.

illustrious company and he walked into the Guild lunch at Rosoff's as if he
was quite as famous and successful as any man present. He was also a good deal
younger than most of the members, but acted as if he had seen and done more
than any of them. By the end of the lunch, he was confidently presiding over
one end of the table, holding the attention of everyone within earshot with an
enthralling blow-by-blow account of his expedition to explore pirate
strongholds of the Spanish Main.

It was accepted, at the American Fiction Guild lunches, that members might
be inclined to blur the distinction between fact and fiction. What mattered
more than strict adherence to literal truth was that the stories should be
entertaining, and on that score young Hubbard could not be faulted. He was a
natural story-teller, able to set the scene quickly and evocatively, describe
the action in rich detail, recount credible dialogue and interject humour with
an acute sense of timing. Arthur Burks was happy to welcome him as a new
member of the Guild, after he had paid his $10 membership fee, of course.

Ron did well in New York. He made the rounds of the pulp publishers, talked
his way into the offices of the important editors, sold a few stories and
generally made himself known. In the evenings he used to sit in Frank Gruber's
room at the Forty-fourth Street Hotel, kicking ideas around with other young
writers and holding forth, although his host eventually tired of Ron's
apparently endless adventures. One evening Gruber sat through a long account
of Ron's experiences in the Marine Corps, his exploration of the upper Amazon
and his years as a white hunter in Africa. At the end of it he asked with
obvious sarcasm: 'Ron, you're eighty-four years old aren't you?'

'What the hell are you talking about?' Ron snapped.

Gruber waved a notebook in which he had been jotting figures 'Well,' he
said, 'you were in the Marines seven years, you were a civil engineer for six
years, you spent four years in Brazil, three in Africa, you barnstormed with
your own flying circus for six years . . . I've just added up all
the years you did this and that and it comes to eighty-four.'

Ron was furious that his escapades should be openly doubted. 'He blew his
tack,' said Gruber.[5] He would react in the same
way at the Guild lunches if someone raised an eyebrow when he was in full
flow. Most of the other members expected their yarns to be taken with a
pinch of salt, but not Ron. It was almost as if he believed his own stories.

Back home with Polly and the baby, Ron continued writing for 'the pulps' at
a ferocious rate, turning out endless variations on a hairy-chested theme. His
protagonists thrashed through jungle

thickets pursued by slavering head-hunters, soared across smoke-smudged
skies in aerial dog-fights, wrestled giant octopi twenty fathoms beneath
storm-tossed seas, duelled with cutlasses on blood-soaked decks strewn with
splintered timbers and held dervish hordes at bay by dispensing steel-jacketed
death from the barrel of a machine-gun. Women rarely made an appearance except
to be rescued from the occasional man-eating lion or grizzly bear. The titles
he gave to his stories vividly attested to their genus - 'The Phantom Patrol',
'Destiny's Drum', 'Man-Killers of the Air', 'Hostage to Death' and 'Hell's
Legionnaire'.

Interspersed between these gripping sagas, Ron still wrote occasional
features for the Sportsman Pilot in his capacity as aerial
hell-raiser. 'There are few men in the United States - nay, the world - as
well qualified as I to write upon the subject of cross-country flying,' he
began a piece in the September 1934 issue. 'It so happens I hold the world's
record in dead reckoning. I just have to marvel about it. Probably no other
pilot in the world could do it. Probably no other pilot in the world actually
has done it so well.'

The braggadocio was a tease, as he soon made clear. On a fifty-mile flight
from New London to Mansfield, Ohio, navigating by the sun, he claimed to have
missed his destination by a record margin. 'The ship bumped to a beautiful
landing. But, and but again, Mansfield was nowhere in sight. We grabbed a
farmer's suspender and snapped it for attention. We asked, disdainfully, where
we might be. Well, there's no use dragging this out. We were 37 miles off
. . . That, I maintain, is a world record.'

In December he was offering readers tips about flying to the West Indies:
'With the long, long shores of Cuba behind you, you hit Port au Prince. Right
now we start assuming definitely that your plane has floats on it, though
we've been assuming it vaguely all along. Otherwise, you'll get your wheels
wet. Port au Prince isn't favoured unless you can wangle the Gendarmerie du
Haiti into letting you use their fields. You'd have to be a better wangler
than we are . . .'

Two months after this feature was published, on 25 February 1935 Ron again
applied for a student pilot's licence. He never got round to taking the test
to become a qualified pilot and never actually applied for another
licence,[6] but he blithely continued writing for
the Sportsman Pilot, offering advice to fellow aviators and filling
many pages of the magazine with dashing accounts of his aerial exploits.

Ron's published work in 1935 included ten pulp novels, three 'novelettes',
twelve short stories and three non-fiction articles. In October,
Adventure magazine invited him to introduce himself to readers in their
'Camp Fire' feature, 'where readers, writers and adventurers meet'. Ron began
in jocular fashion - 'When I was a year

old, they say I showed some signs of settling down, but I think this is
merely rumour . . .' - and touched on all the familiar highspots of
his dazzling career, his 'Asiatic wanderings', his expeditions, his
'barn-storming trip through the Mid-West', and so on.

Perhaps because the same issue of Adventure also published one of
his 'leatherneck yarns', Ron chose to elaborate on his experiences as a
'top-kicker' in the Marines. 'I've known the Corps from Quantico to Peiping,
from the South Pacific to the West Indies,' he wrote. 'To me the Marine Corps
is a more go-to-hell outfit than the much lauded French Foreign Legion ever
could be . . .' Expressing the hope that his thumbnail sketch would
be a passport to the readers' interest, he ended with the promise: 'When I get
back from Central America, where I'm going soon, I'll have another yarn to
tell.'[7]

Ron did not go to Central America but to Hollywood, where one of his
stories, 'The Secret of Treasure Island', had been bought by Columbia to be
filmed as a fifteen-part serial for showing at Saturday morning
matineés. An advertisement in the Motion Picture Herald boasted
that L. Ron Hubbard, 'famous action writer, stunt pilot and world adventurer'
had written an 'excitement-jammed yarn with one of the best box office titles
in years'.

Ron, of course, was pleased to add the title of 'Hollywood scriptwriter' to
his ever increasing roll-call of notable accomplishments and he would soon be
claiming screenwriting credit for a number of successful movies, among them
John Ford's classic, Stagecoach,[8] and
The Plainsman, starring Gary Cooper. Most biographies of L. Ron Hubbard
describe his Hollywood career, inevitably, as a triumph: 'In 1935, L. Ron
Hubbard went to Hollywood and worked under motion picture contracts as a
scriptwriter of numerous films making an outstanding reputation there with
many highly successful films. His work in Hollywood is still
remembered.'[9] He was also said to have salvaged
the careers of both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff by writing them into scripts
when they were out of work. In short, Ron became another 'Hollywood
legend'.[10]

Sadly, it appears he was an unsung legend for his name cannot be found on
any 'highly successful films', with the exception of The Secret of Treasure
Island. But this lack of recognition never prevented Ron from reminiscing
about his golden days in Hollywood: 'I used to sit in my penthouse on Sunset
Boulevard and write stories for New York and then go to my office in the
studio and have my secretary tell everybody I was in conference while I caught
up on my sleep because they couldn't believe anybody could write 136 scenes a
day. The Screen Writers' Guild would have killed me. Their quota was
eight.'[11]

and by the end of the year he was back in New York. Polly was pregnant
again and mindful of what had happened with Nibs, they decided she should have
the baby in a New York hospital. On Wednesday 15 January 1936, she produced a
daughter, Catherine May. Unlike Nibs, Catherine was a lusty, full-term baby,
perfect in every way except for a birthmark on one side of her face. Not long
after she was born, the Hubbards travelled by train to visit Ron's parents in
Bremerton, Washington.

Harry Ross Hubbard had been promoted to Lieutenant Commander, at the age of
forty-eight, in December 1934 and the following July he was posted, for the
third time, to Puget Sound Navy Yard, Bremerton, as an Assistant Supply
Officer. For Ron's mother it was a particularly welcome move: her much-loved
sister, Toilie, was by then also living in Bremerton and their younger sister,
Midgie, lived across the bay in Seattle. May and Harry had already decided
they would retire to Bremerton after he left the Navy and so they bought a
small house at 1212 Gregory Way, just two blocks from the Navy Yard.

Ron's seventy-two-year-old grandmother, Ida Waterbury, was still at 'the
old brick' in Helena, but in October 1935 Helena was hit by an earthquake. The
first tremor was felt during one of President Roosevelt's Friday night
'fireside chats' on the radio. Throughout the following week, fifty-six
further shocks were recorded, none of them serious, but at ten o'clock on the
evening of 18 October a series of violent tremors shook the town, reducing
many of the public buildings to rubble and generating widespread panic. 'The
old brick' survived the earthquake, but in a dangerous condition. Next day,
old Mrs Waterbury caught a train for Bremerton to stay with May and Hub at
Gregory Way.

It was in these circumstances that Polly, Ron and their two small children
were welcomed into the bosom of the Waterbury family when they arrived in
Bremerton in the spring of 1936. All the Waterburys liked Polly. 'She was a
lot of fun,' said Marnie, 'a good sport.' Polly reciprocated their warmth, was
comfortable with the family and happy to have grandparents and great-aunts
around to help take care of the boisterous Nibs while she looked after the
baby.

Such was the conviviality of the milieu that Polly and Ron soon began
looking for a home of their own in the Bremerton area. Property was cheap in
rural Kitsap County and they found a little wooden house at South Colby, a
small community with a post office and general store facing Yukon harbour to
the south of Bremerton. The house was set among cedar trees on a steep
hillside overlooking orchards and meadows sloping down to Puget Sound; from
the front porch at nights you could see the lights of Seattle on the other
side of the water. Polly fell in love with the place and named it 'The
Hilltop'.

Although the house had three rooms upstairs, Ron decided he needed more
privacy for writing and employed a local carpenter to build a rough pine cabin
in the trees at the back of the property which he could use as a 'studio'. He
put in a desk and typewriter and went back to work, churning out such stirring
epics as 'The Baron of Coyote River' for All Western, 'Loot of the
Shantung' for Smashing Novels and 'the Blow Torch Murder' for
Detective Fiction.

The responsibilities of fatherhood weighed lightly on Ron's shoulders and
he ignored any suggestion that he should adapt his working habits to
accommodate family life. He liked to work all night and sleep all morning,
sometimes not making an appearance until two or three o'clock in the
afternoon, at which time Polly would be expected to produce 'breakfast'.

Although he was selling stories almost every week, they never seemed to
have enough money and the owner of the general store in South Colby was
frequently threatening to cut off their credit. Ron was completely unconcerned
by the mounting bills. One day he took the ferry into Seattle and came back
with an expensive phonograph that he had bought on credit at the Bon Marche
department store. When Polly despairingly asked him how he was going to meet
the payments he replied, with a grin, that he had no intention of making
any. He figured it would be at least six months before Bon Marche got round to
repossessing their property, meanwhile they could enjoy it.

Financial worries apart, Polly was perfectly content at The Hilltop. She
enjoyed being a mother and was a keen gardener, spending much of her spare
time clearing the ground around the house and planting shrubs and flowers. Ron
was less easily satisfied by the quiet charm of South Colby and made frequent
trips to New York 'on business'. As his absences became longer and longer,
Polly suspected, correctly, that he might be seeing other women - she was also
acutely aware that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

It was not philandering that took Ron away from home so much as the reality
that being stuck out in the backwater of South Colby was uncomfortably at odds
with his perception of himself. He had spent much of his adult life vigorously
and successfully promoting himself as a 'dare-devil adventurer'. It was a
description that would be used about him time and time again and he never
tired of it. But it was also an image that needed to be sustained, bolstered
here and there, and he could hardly do that sitting in a cabin in Kitsap
Country. No, he needed to be in New York holding his fellow writers in thrall
with epic tales and making sure everyone knew that Ron 'Flash' Hubbard (he
sometimes admitted to 'Flash' as a nickname) was 'quite a character'.

Adventure, who was pleased to share his conviction with his readers:
'I guess L. Ron Hubbard needs no introduction. From the letters you send in,
his yarns are among the most popular we have published. Several of you have
wondered too how he gets the splendid color which always characterizes his
stories of far-away places.

'The answer is, he's been there, brothers. He's been and seen and done. And
plenty of all three of them!'

In July 1936, New York literary agent and columnist Ed Bodin added a
further feather to Ron's crowded cap by reporting in one of his columns that
Ron had hit a staggering one million words in print. It was a claim as
pointless as it was absurd, yet it would be remorselessly escalated over the
years until by 1941 Ron was being variously credited with an output of between
seven and fifteen million words.[12]

Whatever the real figure, Ron was certainly proud of his productivity, the
sheer number of words he was able to hammer out of his typewriter, and there
is no question that he was a truly prolific writer. By 1937 he was using a
roster of marvellously improbable pen names - 'Winchester Remington Colt, Kurt
von Rachen, René Lafayette, Joe Blitz and Legionnaire 148 among them.
His legendary writing speed led to rumours that he typed on to a continuous
roll of paper that fed automatically into an electric typewriter with a
keyboard of his own design featuring single keys fur commonly used words like
'and' and 'the'. It was also said that editors in New York sent messengers to
Ron's hotel room with a cover illustration and note asking him if he would be
kind enough to write a story to fit the picture. The punchline was that the
messengers would be told to wait while Ron dashed off the story, such
was the prodigious fertility of his imagination.

Towards the end of 1937, Ron sold his first hardback novel. Buckskin
Brigades, published by Macaulay, was said to have been inspired by his
experiences as a small boy in the wilds of Montana when he became a blood
brother of the Blackfoot Indians. The theme of the book revolved around the
mistreatment of the Indians by the Hudson Bay Company, although the message
did not perhaps get across too forcibly because the Hudson Bay Company sent
Ron a case of whisky after publication.

Polly was very pleased that Ron had been able to cross the divide between
pulp fiction and 'respectable' publishing, although she was even more pleased
that Macaulay had offered an advance of $2500 for Buckskin Brigades. It
was money they badly needed to clear their debts. They both waited - Ron was
back from New York - with considerable impatience for the cheque to arrive. On
the morning the local post office telephoned to say there was a money order
for collection, Ron rushed out of the house and was gone

for hours. He returned in the late afternoon in a state of high excitement
and announced to Polly that he had bought a boat, a wonderful boat, a
thirty-foot ketch called the Magician. It was a double-ended Libby
hull, the kind they used to catch salmon up in Alaska. It had a small cabin
and he was going to put a new engine in it and change the rigging and
. . . Polly could hardly believe her ears. She had a drawer full of
unpaid bills and her husband had just blown all their money on a boat!

Ron's best friend in Bremerton was a thrusting young insurance salesman by
the name of Robert MacDonald Ford. 'Almost the first thing Ron did when he got
the boat', Ford recalled, 'was to get some letter-heads printed. Ron was
always having letter-heads printed, always on the best bond paper. The heading
was "Yukon Harbor Marine Ways". There was no such company, but that didn't
bother Ron - he only wanted the letter-head so he could buy things for the
boat at wholesale prices.'

Ford met Ron because he was always on the look-out for new business. When
one of his policy holders ran into a car owned by a Lieutenant-Commander
H.R. Hubbard and caused $15 worth of damage, he delivered the settlement draft
personally at 1212 Gregory Way in the hope of selling some more
insurance. Ron's mother was home when Ford called. 'She was a funny little
woman,' he said, 'sort of wrinkled and dried up. When I asked her if she knew
anyone who needed insurance she said her son, who lived out at South Colby,
didn't have any. She telephoned him right then, offered to pay half the cost
and we wrote the business over the 'phone. I figured if she was going to pay
I'd have a good chance of collecting the premiums.'

A couple of weeks later, Ford decided to pay his new policy holder a visit,
accompanied by his wife, Nancy. It took them a little while to find The
Hilltop at South Colby and when they finally arrived at the house Polly
answered the door and said her husband was still asleep as he had been working
all night. She apologized and invited them to return for dinner that evening.

The Fords and the Hubbards liked each other on sight and quickly discovered
they had much in common. They had children of similar ages, both wives were
avid gardeners and excellent cooks, and Ron and Mac were the same age, keen on
sailing and loved to talk. That first evening spent together at The Hilltop
ended with much hilarity when the two men skulked off to the County gravel
pile in the dead of night to fill ballast bags Polly had been sewing for the
boat.

Thereafter, Ford was a frequent visitor. He used to sit in the cabin with
Ron drinking China tea and playing chess by candlelight, using the exquisitely
carved chess set he said he had brought back from the

East - even the pawns were fearsome little warriors carrying
swords. Sometimes they would shoot at a target pinned to the cabin wall with
Ron's air pistol; sometimes they would just talk for hours on end, well into
the night. They often discussed what was happening in Europe, what Hitler was
up to and whether or not there would be a war.

'He was a sharp guy,' said Ford, 'very stimulating and fascinating to be
around. He was interested in a lot of things and was pretty well
informed. When he talked about the things he'd done, sometimes I would think
he was feeding me a line, but then you'd find out that it had actually
happened. He told me once that when he was gliding a guy wire had snapped and
smoothed off the ends of his fingers, leaving them very sensitive. I'm pretty
sure that happened. When we went to see Stagecoach - the original one
with John Wayne - he told me he'd worked on the script. I looked for his name
on the credits, but didn't see it, although I didn't necessarily disbelieve
him. It's possible he exaggerated his exploits a little, but he was a writer
and did have a very fertile imagination. Certainly he got into a lot of
things.

'He and Polly were on pretty good terms. She was an independent sort of
gal, wouldn't take a lot of crap from anybody. They had their arguments, yes,
but by and large it wasn't that bad. She'd take a drink, but never much. We
didn't drink too much in those days. They were in fairly dire straits for
money; the grocer was always pressing them to pay his bill. It would take Ron
two or three nights to finish a novelette. Whenever he got some money in, he'd
see the grocer was satisfied and then he'd play for a while on his boat, the
Maggie.'[13]

The Fords and the Hubbards joined Bremerton Yacht Club at the same time and
whenever there was a dance they could be found at the same table, usually
laughing and always enjoying themselves. In some combination the two families
were involved in any number of madcap projects and outings - Polly and Nancy
once took a ferry across to Victoria in Canada to visit a horticultural show
and returned with dozens of stolen cuttings stuffed into their bras.

On another memorable occasion, Ron and Mac decided they would build an
experimental sail-boat with inflatable rubber wheels on the theory that it
would be subject to less friction than a conventional hull. They constructed a
crude timber frame with three axles and six wheels made out of inner tubes on
wooden drums and borrowed a mast and sail from a small boat in the harbour. It
was agreed that Ron, the more experienced sailor of the two, would conduct the
first trials. He kitted himself out for the occasion in sea boots, cap and
yachting rig, and they towed the strange craft out into the Sound with a
row-boat. Ron confidently stepped on board and as he did so there was an
ominous crack. One of the crucial joints of the frame snapped under his weight
and the entire contraption rapidly disintegrated.

The sight of Ron in his natty sailor suit clinging grimly to the wreckage
and bellowing to be taken off was too much for Ford. He collapsed in the
bottom of the row-boat and the more he laughed the angrier Ron became. In the
end, Ford rowed ashore and let someone else pick up his friend. 'He had a real
temper and I sure as hell wasn't going to let him catch me when he had his
temper up like that,' he explained. 'He would have killed me if he'd got his
hands on me at the time. I stayed out of sight for a couple of hours but he
soon cooled down. We had dinner together that night.'

Undaunted by the failure of the rubber-wheeled boat, the two friends could
soon be found testing a model boat with an unusual V-shaped keel of their own
design in Polly's washing machine, trying to figure out an accurate method of
measuring the drag. Then they spent several days on the Maggie with a
complicated arrangement of zips and canvas sleeves with which they hoped to
improve the efficiency of the sails.

While the men were playing, it was inevitable that Polly and Nancy would
spend a great deal of time together with their children. Thus Nancy knew that
Polly suspected Ron of having affairs with other women during his frequent
absences back East. Nancy told Mac, who said he was sure Polly was wrong.

A few weeks later, the Hubbards arrived separately at the regular Saturday
night dance at Bremerton Yacht Club. Polly drove alone from The Hilltop and
Ron sailed across in the Maggie, making no attempt to conceal his surly
demeanour. 'They were not speaking to each other,' said Ford, 'and it took us
a while to find out what had happened. It seems Ron had written letters to a
couple of girls in New York and left them in the mail box to be picked
up. Polly found them and got so mad that she opened the envelopes, switched
the letters and put them back in the box. She didn't tell him what she had
done until they had been picked up. Polly was a great girl, a lot of fun.'

Next morning, Ron packed his bag and caught a train for New York, still in
a vile temper.